Martha gave him a long and intent look. He studied her expression, tried to decipher it, and for once failed.
He was giving Martha a final scratch when she lifted her chin from the fence and turned in the direction of the river.
‘What is it?’
He looked that way himself. There was nothing to see, and he had heard nothing either. Still, there must be something … He and the pig exchanged a look. He had never seen that look in her eyes before, yet he had only to compare it with his own sensations to know what it meant.
‘I think you’re right, Martha. Something is going to happen.’
Mrs Vaughan and the River Goblins
A PEARL OF water formed in the corner of an eye. The eye belonged to a young woman who was lying in the bottom of a boat. The bead of liquid rested in the place where the pink inner of the eyelid swells into the dainty complication of a tear duct. It shivered with the rocking motion of the boat but, supported by the lashes that sprouted beneath and above it, did not break or fall.
‘Mrs Vaughan?’
The young woman had rowed across the river, then drawn the blades in and allowed the little boat to drift into the reed bed which now held it. By the time the words from the bank reached her, the thick white river mist had rinsed the urgency out of them. The words drifted into her ear, washed out and waterlogged, and sounded scarcely louder than the thoughts in her own head.
Mrs Vaughan … that’s me, Helena thought. It sounded like the name of another person altogether. She could imagine a Mrs Vaughan and it would be nothing like herself. Someone old. About thirty, probably, with a face like the portraits that hung in the hallway of her husband’s house. It was odd to think that only a few years ago she had been Helena Greville. It seemed a lot longer. When she thought about that girl now, it was as if she were thinking about someone she used to know, and know quite well, but would never see again. Helena Greville was gone for good.
‘It’s too cold to be out, Mrs Vaughan.’
Cold, yes. Helena Vaughan counted the coldnesses. There was the cold of being coatless, hatless, gloveless. The cold of the air that dampened her dress to her skin and raised goosebumps on her chest and arms and legs. There was the cold of the air as it entered her, stinging her nostrils and making her lungs quiver. After all those came the coldness of the river. It was the slowest, taking its time to reach her through the thick planks of the boat, but when it did it burnt the points of her shoulder blades, the back of her skull, her ribcage, the base of her spine, all the places where her body lay hard against the curve of the wood. The river came nudging at the boat, draining her of warmth with its lulling, rocking motion. She closed her eyes.
‘Are you there? Oh, answer me, for heaven’s sake!’
Answer … The word dredged up a memory from a few years ago. Aunt Eliza had talked about an answer. ‘Think before you answer,’ she had said, ‘because opportunities like this don’t come every day.’
Aunt Eliza was the little sister of Helena’s father. Widowed in her forties and childless, she had come to live with her brother and the child of his late marriage, to disrupt and upset them, as Helena saw it. Helena’s mother had died when the child was an infant, and it was Eliza’s view that her niece needed a maternal figure to take her in hand. Eliza’s brother was an eccentric who had neglected to instil proper discipline and the girl was barely educated. Eliza had tried, but she had failed to have much influence. Helena had complained in the early days to her father about Aunt Eliza, and he had told her with a wink, ‘She has nowhere else to go, Pirate. Just nod and say yes to whatever she says, and afterwards do just as you like. That’s what I always do.’ The strategy had worked. Father and daughter had continued to live together in great friendship, and neither one permitted Eliza to interfere with their days on the river and in the boatyard.
In the garden, between exhortations to slow down, Aunt Eliza had told Helena a great many things she already knew perfectly well, since they were about herself. She reminded Helena (as though she might have forgotten) that she was motherless. She alluded to her father’s great age and poor health. While Helena half listened, she had drawn Aunt Eliza in a certain direction and, absorbed in what she was saying, Aunt Eliza had allowed herself to be led. They came to the river and walked along the bank. Helena breathed in the thrill of the cold, bright air, watched the ducks bobbing in the lively water. Her shoulders twitched at the thought of oars. In her stomach she felt the anticipation of that first pull out into the water, that meeting of the boat with the current … ‘Upstream or down?’ her father always said. ‘If it’s not the one it has to be the other – and it’ll be an adventure either way!’
Aunt Eliza was reminding Helena of the state of her father’s finances, which were even more precarious than his health, and then – Helena’s thoughts had been drifting with the river, she might have missed something – Eliza was talking about a Mr Vaughan, his kindness and decency, and the fact that his business was thriving. ‘Though if you do not wish it, your father instructs me to tell you that you have only to say so and the whole thing will be put aside and not a word more said about it,’ Aunt Eliza concluded. This was initially mystifying to Helena, and then suddenly perfectly clear.
‘Which one is this Mr Vaughan?’ she wanted to know.
Aunt Eliza was nonplussed. ‘You have met him several times … Why don’t you pay more attention?’ But to Helena, her father’s friends and associates were versions of the same figure: male, old, dull. None of them were remotely as interesting as her father, and she was surprised he spent any time with them at all.
‘Is Mr Vaughan with Father now?’
She darted off, ignoring Aunt Eliza’s protests and running back towards the house. In the garden, she took a leap over the ferns and sidled up to the study window. By clambering on to the plinth of a large urn and clinging to the window ledge, she could just see into the room, where her father was smoking in the company of another gentleman.
Mr Vaughan was not one of the red-nosed or grizzled ones. She recognized him now as the smiling younger man with whom her father sat up late, over a cigar and a drink. When she went to bed, she could hear them laughing together. She was glad her father had somebody to cheer him up in the evenings. Mr Vaughan had brown hair, brown eyes and a brown beard. Beyond that, the one thing that set him apart was his voice. Most of the time he spoke just like any other Englishman, but once in a while something slipped out of his mouth that had an unfamiliar ring to it. She had been interested in listening out for these odd sounds and had asked him about it.
‘I grew up in New Zealand,’ he had told her. ‘My family has mines there.’
She considered the ordinary man through the window and felt no strong objection to him.
Helena edged her heels from the urn’s plinth and hung, swaying pleasantly from the window ledge, enjoying the stretch in her arms and shoulders. When she heard Aunt Eliza approach she let herself drop.
‘I’ll have to leave home, I suppose, if I marry Mr Vaughan?’
‘You will be leaving home anyway, one day soon. Your father has been so unwell. Your future is uncertain. Naturally he is anxious to see you settled in life. If you were to marry Mr Vaughan, you would go to live with him at Buscot Lodge, whereas if you don’t—’